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CSS CSS Basics (2014) Getting Started with CSS External Style Sheets

How does coding work in countries that don't speak English? Do coders still use English or other languages for coding?

An example, someone in Spain write code using phrases like "stylesheet", "bold", etc? What about languages that use characters, such as Chinese?

i heard the syntax (structure ) is in English but naming for example in html id's and classes they probably use native words.

3 Answers

Brandon Keene
Brandon Keene
7,217 Points

I was curious about that myself a few days ago. This article does a decent job of answering the question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages

The gist is that english-based programming languages are predominant even in non-english speaking countries, but several programming languages do exist that are written in non-english languages.

At the end of the day, our programming languages just give us a way to issue human-readable commands to the machine, and the compiler or interpreter for the language then translates those commands into machine code. So, as long as the compiler/interpreter knows how to translate "stylesheet" or it's spanish or chinese equivalent into machine code, the language works.

At least, that's my understanding.

Nicolรกs Carrasco-Stevenson
PLUS
Nicolรกs Carrasco-Stevenson
Courses Plus Student 5,668 Points

As a native spanish speaker I can tell you that we do most (if not all) of our programming in english with only proper names in spanish, that's is things like ids, classes, javascript method names or variable names. Also comments can be done in Spanish.

However, since english is the lingua franca of our times actually coding and commenting in English will make it easier to share your work on online communities and will broaden your audience if you ever need help or feedback

Mark VonGyer
Mark VonGyer
21,239 Points

yes you can program in other languages. Alot of the code is in English, but object names, classes etc will all be in a funny language that only the speakers of that language will understand. All the keywords would be English tho; so you could follow the code to some degree.